WHEN THE DARKNESS COMES

One Man’s Journey Through the Rabbit Hole

Chapter 1

When the Darkness Comes

There was a knock during the night, or at least I think there was. It was one knock, sufficiently distinct to wake me but not sufficiently convincing to get me out of bed to investigate.

There was no accompanying creak from the boards on the deck, and anybody walking towards our door normally announces themselves through timber long before they get the opportunity to knock. Perhaps it was something outside, perhaps it was part of a dream, or perhaps it was simply another contribution from a brain that had already decided sleep was going to be conducted in instalments.

Sleep these days can be a broken mass of drifting rather than something with a beginning, middle and end. The CPAP machine and I continue our long-running war, although the present battle has reached something approaching a stalemate. A newer mask has maintained its integrity and removed most of the leaks, which were yet another little annoyance capable of assuming disproportionate importance at three in the morning. There are victories in life that deserve champagne, and apparently there are others that involve successfully strapping a piece of plastic to your face without air escaping through the side.

Eventually morning arrived, although I am not sure I did. There was irritation left over from the night before, none of it particularly significant when exposed to daylight but all of it apparently significant enough to be hanging around.

Refereeing decisions in the NRL that any normal person could plainly see were wrong had annoyed me, which is one of those wonderfully ridiculous sentences that becomes less ridiculous when you have lived with anger for long enough. Robyn had also insisted upon setting the alarm for a time I considered completely irrelevant to our lives because a tradesman was coming to work on the house next door. She wanted to make sure she was available, although in practical terms that meant making sure I was available because dealing with the tradesman was not something she particularly wanted to do.

None of this constituted tragedy, and even in the mood I was in I knew that. Nobody had died, nobody was seriously ill as far as I knew, the bank had not rung, the house was still standing and the children were getting on with their lives. The victims of the refereeing decisions would presumably survive the injustice, an alarm clock was hardly grounds for emotional collapse, and a tradesman arriving next door was unlikely to feature in any psychiatrist’s textbook as one of the great causes of human despair.

Yet something wasn’t right, and that recognition didn’t require much investigation. I have known the feeling for long enough to understand the difference between being annoyed at an alarm clock and the deeper thing already moving underneath it.

I find lying in bed difficult when I cannot sleep. There are other days when listening to Robyn snore can while away the time, and there is something strangely comforting about lying beside another human being who is completely unaware of whatever nonsense is taking place inside your head. On this morning there was no comfort in staying there. I was tired, as I seem to be most of the time now, but tiredness and sleep are not always willing partners.

Eventually I got up, although getting up should not be confused with beginning the day. There are mornings when the normal procession follows without thought: shower, dress, office, computer and something resembling a plan. There are other mornings when even the shower disappears from the agenda, not through any conscious decision that personal hygiene has become an optional extra but because the rut takes over and simple acts that normally occur automatically suddenly require a decision. This was one of those mornings.

It wasn’t one of the really bad days, and that needs to be said at the beginning. There have been days so dark it has seemed extraordinary that the sun could continue to shine outside, but this wasn’t one of them. Perhaps that makes it a better place to begin this story because depression is not always a dramatic collapse witnessed against thunderclouds and accompanied by suitably miserable music. Sometimes it is just an ordinary Saturday morning when you don’t particularly want to move.

There should have been a reason for the feeling, which meant I did what accountants tend to do when something doesn’t balance. I went looking for the transaction that caused it.

Yesterday seemed the obvious place to start. I had driven into Forster early for a blood test and a scan associated with a kidney stone, deliberately timing the trip to miss the rush and comply with the fasting requirements. I then discovered the CT scan couldn’t be done until the afternoon, which converted one fifty-kilometre round trip into two and added another minor irritation to a day that otherwise had nothing particularly wrong with it.

There was plenty of time between trips to attack client work. The work wasn’t especially overwhelming and there was nothing on the desk that should have frightened somebody who had spent a lifetime dealing with tax returns, structures, businesses, crises and people who had discovered that ignoring a letter from the Tax Office does not cause the Tax Office to forget you exist. I simply couldn’t bring myself to enter the battle, despite knowing perfectly well that the work would still be waiting when I eventually did.

Instead, I helped a youngster with his tax return, something I have always been prepared to do for local kids without charging them where the return is basically salary and wages. Tax is one of those life skills we somehow expect people to understand through osmosis. We teach all manner of things at school, some of which will never again trouble the average student after the final examination, yet we can send them into employment without understanding what a tax deduction is, why they need records or why driving from home to their normal workplace does not magically become deductible because petrol is expensive.

This particular youngster was at least trying, although getting him to the point of completing the return had required appointments to be moved around his work commitments. We finally got it done and sent it away for signature, at which point he remembered he had bought a laptop for work. Of course he had, because apparently remembering relevant information before the accountant completes the return would remove one of the traditional pleasures of taxation practice.

So back we went and adjusted it, because there wasn’t much point becoming irritated. It was par for the course and, more importantly, he was trying to do the right thing despite being woefully equipped to do it. Tomorrow another youngster will probably arrive with another collection of misconceptions, forgotten expenses and an expectation that somehow I will know what questions to ask to discover the things they don’t know they should tell me. I will probably help them too.

After the first trip to Forster and before the second, I weeded around the perimeter planter boxes on my hands and knees. After the CT scan I sneaked into Bunnings on the way home, bought some vegetable seedlings and planted them. There was something to show for the day that did not involve a tax return or a set of accounts, and sometimes dirt under the fingernails is a more satisfying measure of progress than another file moved from one pile to another.

Nothing catastrophic had happened during any of it. There was no telephone call that changed everything, no financial disaster, no family crisis and no great professional humiliation. There were weeds removed from garden beds and seedlings planted in their place. A young bloke got his tax return done, while Bunnings made a few dollars out of me and thereby maintained the natural order of the Australian economy.

Then I went to bed and somewhere between yesterday and today the weather inside changed. I could audit yesterday as many times as I liked, but there was no transaction sitting there marked Reason Jeff Feels Like Shit Tomorrow Morning.

The physical evidence of what I should have been doing was only a few metres away in my office. There were six names left on the whiteboard, although there had been considerably more when this latest exercise began. Most had now been crossed out, and the plan, such as it was, said the remaining six would be completed by 30 September. Four days away.

The best-laid plans of mice, men and accountants probably suffer from the same fundamental weakness. They assume tomorrow’s version of us will be as enthusiastic about the plan as today’s version was when he wrote it.

There isn’t enough work left to consume me, which in some ways would almost be easier to understand. There is just enough to annoy me, enough to remain visible and enough to whisper that I haven’t finished. The files don’t shout, threaten or complain, but they don’t disappear either.

My largest client by billing has been done and dusted. The second largest remains on the board, not because of any sensible priority system but because the complexity of the work has caused me to pick it up and put it down several times. Some of the smaller ones have disappeared first because they could be completed, crossed off and converted into visible progress, which is not necessarily good workflow management but is extremely satisfying to a man standing in front of a whiteboard with a marker pen.

I should be able to let go, but I can’t quite get there. Part of the problem is a belief I know is probably a misnomer but which remains stubbornly embedded after all these years: nobody will deal with these people quite the way I do.

That isn’t a claim that I am the greatest accountant ever to wield a calculator. There are accountants technically better than me in particular fields, accountants with greater resources, larger firms, younger brains and considerably more enthusiasm for keeping abreast of every legislative utterance produced by Canberra. My concern is less about whether somebody else can prepare the return than whether they will see the person attached to it.

I have tried to treat every client as though they were my largest client. The bloke whose affairs produce a modest fee deserves the same respect as the business whose annual billing has another zero attached to it. Yet accounting practices, particularly larger ones, inevitably have numbers of their own to meet. Jobs go out the door, bills go out with them and cash comes back in, because that is how the business works.

I understand all of that intellectually and spent enough years running a practice to know the economics better than most. Knowing it doesn’t make me comfortable handing people over, because somewhere along the way their problems became more personal to me than perhaps they should have.

Crossing the sixth name from the whiteboard probably won’t produce the great sense of liberation retirement brochures would have me expect. More likely it will mean the search for my replacement becomes earnest. I already have an accountant in mind, somebody I have dealt with through Business Blueprint over the years and somebody I think might understand that these are not merely files being transferred from one practice to another.

Still I worry, because apparently even retirement requires me to worry about whether everybody else will be all right after I retire. There is a certain absurdity in wanting desperately to get rid of the final six jobs while simultaneously being concerned about who will look after the people when they are no longer mine.

Perhaps that shouldn’t surprise me. When I was a teenager, I had an applique on my jean jacket that read Soft Shoulder. At the time it was simply the sort of thing you put on a jean jacket, but decades later it feels less like decoration and more like an occupational hazard. The bloody thing seems to have burnt its way through the denim and into the shoulder underneath.

People lean, and for most of my life I have allowed them to. Sometimes they pay you for the privilege and sometimes they don’t, while occasionally they arrive with problems that have been developing for years and expect you to discover a solution before lunch.

For most of my professional life I have been very good at being useful. What I have gradually discovered is that being useful is not necessarily the same thing as being well, and the ability to solve somebody else’s problem provides no guarantee that I can identify my own.

I have also become very good at presenting the version of Jeff required by the room. Dumbing It Down explores that from another direction because learning to read the room, understand what it expects and provide the acceptable version of yourself is a skill that can become almost automatic. Competence can be both defence and disguise, particularly when people have come to expect competence from you.

The telephone can ring on a morning like this and I can answer it with the same “Jeff Banks” I have used thousands of times. The voice will work, the accounting brain will engage and somebody can ask a question about their business or tax affairs. I can move numbers around, identify a problem, suggest a solution and probably throw in a smartarse remark somewhere along the way. They will hang up having spoken to exactly the Jeff Banks they expected to find.

I could go to golf and do much the same thing. I could laugh, sledge somebody, complain about my own inability to hit a golf ball in the direction intended and appear entirely normal. Someone meeting me for the first time that afternoon might consider me outgoing, opinionated, funny, irritating or some combination of all four, but depression probably wouldn’t make the shortlist.

I have had a lot of practice at keeping the inside from leaking through to the outside. Perhaps that is another reason this thing can become so lonely, because if you become sufficiently accomplished at convincing everybody that you are all right, you can hardly complain when they believe you.

Robyn gets the other version, although I don’t deliberately choose to give her the worst of me. She gets it because she is there when everybody else has gone home, when the telephone has stopped ringing and when there is no client, employee or golfing mate requiring the public version. She sees the silences, the irritation, the flitting around the garden between chores and mindless requirements of life, and the times when the office door becomes more attractive than human company.

She has read my books and says very little about this part of them. Perhaps that is a good thing because there is no sentence she can produce that fixes it, and there is no magic combination of reassurance and affection that guarantees the Black Dog will pack his bags and leave. There is no fix in her hands any more than there is necessarily one in mine.

Sometimes understanding is not about repairing the hole, because some holes apparently don’t respond to repair schedules. Sometimes it is just holding the net while the other person works out whether he is falling at all.

There was a time, somewhere in the five years before we sold the accounting practice, when hiding it had stopped working even for me. The anger had become enormous, with staff capable of annoying me, clients capable of annoying me and the endless grind of business capable of annoying me. Small irritations were being converted into reactions considerably larger than the event deserved.

I was angry, very angry, and somewhere underneath that anger there was enough of Logical Jeff left to recognise that this wasn’t sustainable. I promoted the visit to the doctor myself, which matters to me when I remember it because nobody dragged me there.

Robyn didn’t issue an ultimatum and a doctor didn’t stumble upon the problem during an appointment for something else. I knew we needed help, and I asked Robyn to come with me because I wanted her to hear something from me that perhaps I had failed to demonstrate particularly well at home.

It wasn’t her, even though she must have taken the brunt of much of it. That is what happens when the person closest to you is also the person in range when the armour comes off. I wanted her in the room because whatever was happening inside my head, I needed her to know she hadn’t caused it.

The doctor gave me one of those written questionnaires where you tick boxes, choose descriptions and answer questions about mood and other indicators somebody has sensibly worked out can be accumulated into a score. I did what accountants do and answered the questions, and I answered them truthfully because there seemed little point going to a doctor for help and then manipulating the evidence.

When he looked at the result, he almost sighed. I don’t remember the precise medical terminology and don’t intend to manufacture it now, but his reaction made the message clear enough. The accumulated score wasn’t merely uncomfortable or slightly concerning; the scale of the affliction was, in substance, more than severe.

Suddenly the conversation was moving towards the possibility that I should be admitted somewhere rather than simply sent home with instructions to get more exercise and think pleasant thoughts. Logical Jeff immediately identified what he considered the important issue, and naturally it wasn’t Jeff.

It was the practice, because in my head this was all about to go pear shaped professionally. How were we going to maintain an accounting practice with its leader in what my mind immediately labelled the looney bin? What happened to the goodwill of the client base if word got around that the bloke they relied upon to tell them their businesses were under control apparently couldn’t keep himself under control? What would staff think, and what would clients think?

There is probably something revealing about being confronted with evidence that your mental health has deteriorated to the point where a doctor is discussing whether you should be admitted to a facility and immediately worrying about the goodwill value of the practice. There is also something revealing about the language I used inside my own head: looney bin, unstable, and all the other labels that could be attached to somebody who was supposed to be the person others relied upon.

Those weren’t medical terms. They were the language of stigma, fear and the professional mask I had spent years constructing. I could accept that clients had problems and I could accept that staff had problems. I could spend hours helping somebody else through a disaster and never consider their need for assistance evidence that they were somehow defective, yet applying the same generosity to myself apparently required a different accounting standard.

One question in the assessment mattered enormously because it asked whether I had ever felt like suicide. I answered no, without hesitation, because that was the truth then and remains the truth of my experience.

Whatever darkness has arrived over the years, however deep the trough, I have never wanted to end my life. My own internal response to suicide has always contained a harsh judgement about the act itself, a determination I constructed for myself and which became part of the barrier I would not cross. I cannot fairly turn that private defence mechanism into a judgement upon somebody whose depression has taken them somewhere mine never has, because I have never stood where they stood.

My children were always part of my answer because I wanted to know what they would do tomorrow. That might sound almost ridiculously simple against the seriousness of the doctor’s questionnaire, but curiosity about the people I love has been one of the strongest threads running through my life. What would they become, what ridiculous thing would they do next, what success would arrive that none of us had predicted, and what problem would they bring through the door believing Dad might somehow know the answer?

Tomorrow contained them, and I wanted tomorrow. What I didn’t always want was the feeling I sometimes had to carry into it.

That distinction matters because there have been days when the darkness has been profound. There are days when a pit in the bottom of the stomach feels almost physical, a pressure from inside as though the world has somehow become smaller and is closing around me. On those days “blue” is far too pretty a word for it and black seems closer.

I don’t want life to stop on those days, and I never have. I want that feeling to stop, and there is a considerable difference between the two.

Perhaps that is also why I have sometimes wondered whether I know what “happy” actually feels like. Books use the word with enormous confidence, and people talk about happiness as though it is a destination with road signs and adequate parking. We are encouraged to pursue it, find it, protect it, choose it and occasionally buy things from people who claim to have discovered the route.

I’m not sure I have ever experienced whatever the books mean by it, although that doesn’t mean my life has been devoid of joy. Far from it. I have laughed until I hurt, loved and been loved, watched my children do things that have made me enormously proud, caught fish, played golf, travelled, built businesses, written books, planted vegetables and sat with people whose company I genuinely enjoyed. There have been countless moments I would not trade.

Perhaps that is happiness and my definition has simply been wrong. Perhaps my mistake has been expecting some sustained emotional state rather than recognising those moments for what they were, or perhaps there really is something other people feel that has always been more elusive for me. I don’t know, and one of the purposes of writing this book is to resist the temptation to pretend that I have finally worked it out.

What I know is the undulation, the peaks and troughs that seem to move according to rules I have never completely understood. Sometimes there is an identifiable cause, and sometimes I can trace the descent backwards and see where it began.

A disagreement with Robyn can do it, although often it isn’t the disagreement itself that causes the trouble. It is the aftermath, when something catches inside and the argument finishes but the internal conversation continues. Before long one event has recruited every other piece of evidence the prosecution can find, and the original disagreement has almost become irrelevant.

Other times there is business pressure, disappointment, exhaustion or the feeling that I have given more of myself than I intended and discovered nobody particularly noticed. Those episodes at least give Logical Jeff something to work with, even if his conclusions don’t necessarily make the feeling disappear.

Then there are the times when nothing happens at all. They are the ones I still cannot reconcile because there is no cause to argue with, no behaviour to change and no event to put into perspective.

Yesterday can be a perfectly reasonable day and tomorrow can arrive carrying darkness. The accountant in me goes looking for the missing transaction and sometimes has to accept the possibility that there isn’t one.

Perhaps the difficulty with giving deserves some of that examination as well, because I have spent a lot of my life telling myself that giving should be sufficient reward in itself. Experience has not always supported such a tidy proposition.

On Valentine’s Day 1988, two gentlemen walked into our Potts Point office after returning from the Christmas break to discover there was no cash in the bank and a large workforce expecting to be paid. Their legal counsel, who was a good friend of our practice, suggested they come and sit down with us. For the next several years we helped work them out of their cash-flow problems and into various successes.

Their faith in me eventually waned following the depression surrounding my divorce, to the point where an unironed shirt was apparently capable of becoming evidence that things were wrong. There is a much larger story sitting inside that experience, but what remains relevant all these years later is how easily years of being the person somebody leans upon can disappear once the shoulder itself appears less reliable.

There was also the plumber who wanted to be seen as a big player, creating more and more entities and extending more and more tentacles towards wealth until a substantial bad debt helped bring everything towards the brink. We helped bring him back, while bills accumulated during the period when cash flow was difficult and I didn’t chase them because chasing somebody for money while trying to save their business seemed counterproductive. Later, he refused to pay them.

Then there was John, an Italian whose family bonds seemed capable of being broken only by death. Bills accumulated there too, despite assets existing that could have been sold to meet the liabilities. Property, however, was never to be sold, so there was always another reason, another piece of work, another interpretation required for a banker and another way to extend the credit.

These stories are not evidence that I am a saint surrounded by ungrateful bastards, although the Black Dog would be delighted with that interpretation. It would be wonderfully convenient on a dark morning, but it wouldn’t be true. I was paid for much of what I did, I was an accountant, and clients quite reasonably expected me to be good at my job because that was part of the transaction.

You work and you get paid, although sometimes even the second half of that equation becomes negotiable. Yet somewhere underneath those commercial transactions there has always been another ledger operating, and I am less comfortable admitting to it. I give a lot of myself to people and perhaps, despite pretending otherwise, some part of me wants that to be noticed.

I don’t necessarily want it repaid or converted into some grand reciprocal obligation. I don’t expect everybody whose tax return I ever completed to arrive at Smiths Lake bearing gifts and expressions of eternal gratitude, but acknowledgement would sometimes be a nice change.

The expectation is generally straightforward: you are good at what you do, we pay for it and that’s it. From the client’s perspective that is entirely reasonable, yet perhaps the difficulty is that I haven’t always treated what I do as merely a transaction.

The trouble with giving is that the recipient quite reasonably takes what they needed and returns to their life. The young bloke whose tax return I did yesterday isn’t supposed to spend the next week wondering whether his accountant is okay. He came because he needed help with tax, I helped him with tax and, from his perspective, the transaction is complete.

Sometimes the person doing the giving doesn’t feel quite as complete as the transaction, and that can become dangerous territory for me. The Black Dog is a magnificent auditor of perceived unfairness because he can find every occasion when I helped somebody and they moved on, every invoice left unpaid, every client who changed accountants, every person who forgot to say thank you and every moment when faith seemed to travel in only one direction.

He is considerably less diligent with the other side of the ledger. He misplaces gratitude, undervalues affection and discounts loyalty, while apparently having no understanding of goodwill despite my decades in accounting. On darker days he can even write off tomorrow completely, despite a fairly substantial body of historical evidence suggesting tomorrow has a habit of turning up.

Which brings me back to this morning, although in truth I haven’t gone anywhere. The whiteboard is still only a few metres away, the six names are still written on it and the vegetable seedlings I planted yesterday are outside doing whatever vegetable seedlings do when nobody is watching them.

Today isn’t one of the worst days, and I have a plan, which helps. There are those six names on the board, things to write, jobs around the house and garden, golf to be played again, people to talk to and probably another youngster somewhere who thinks buying lunch at work is tax deductible because he wouldn’t have bought lunch if he hadn’t gone to work.

Life is still there, and so is Robyn. So are the children whose tomorrows I still want to see, even though they are now perfectly capable of conducting those tomorrows without needing me to supervise them.

The strange part is that knowing all of that doesn’t necessarily alter the feeling. Logical Jeff can produce the evidence and depressed Jeff can look at exactly the same evidence and remain unmoved. There is no argument sufficiently clever to make the stomach release its grip simply because the numbers say it should.

Over the years I have tried things, although the story of those attempts belongs to the chapters ahead. Doctors have been involved and medication has been involved, while exercise has been involved with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Work has both helped and hurt, and writing can allow me to disappear into somewhere else for hours. Facebook can perform much the same function with considerably less intellectual justification.

Sometimes I shut myself in the office and write, while other times I scroll through Facebook until enough of the day has disappeared to make the exercise almost an achievement. I have never been much of a reader, and I suspect all the books I have read cover to cover during my life could be counted on the fingers of two hands. For somebody who now spends so much time writing them, there is probably another psychological investigation waiting there for somebody with considerably more time than me.

Mostly I wait the darkness out. That may not sound like much of a strategy after all these years, but there is a certain knowledge contained within it because the darkness has come before and then moved again. I don’t necessarily know why it arrived, and I don’t necessarily know why it leaves.

There are no timetables I have been able to identify. I can wake one morning feeling more blue than the morning before and recognise that blue may be heading towards black, while on another morning I can wake up okay. Sometimes there has been an event I can blame, sometimes there has been an aftermath spiral I can trace and sometimes the emotional ledger simply refuses to balance.

Today I can still function, which can itself disguise what is happening. I could answer the telephone and you probably wouldn’t know, just as I could meet you at golf and you probably wouldn’t know. I could write a chapter about depression and you might reasonably assume that the bloke capable of analysing it in several thousand words must have it pretty well sorted.

I don’t have it sorted, and that may be the first thing worth understanding about this book. I have lived with it long enough to recognise some of the terrain, but recognition and control are not the same thing.

I know some of the footsteps now, and I know there are things capable of triggering the descent and things that occasionally help me climb out of it. I know that anger has sometimes travelled alongside the depression, and I know that the people closest to me can receive the fallout from battles they didn’t start. I also know there are mornings when none of the explanations works.

The house is still here and Robyn is still here. My children are out there somewhere preparing tomorrow’s surprise, although at their ages I doubt they are doing it specifically for my benefit.

There are six names on a whiteboard waiting for an accountant who cannot quite bring himself to abandon them. There are vegetable seedlings outside that went into the ground yesterday, which is perhaps proof of something if I were inclined to search for symbolism in Bunnings purchases. Somewhere in my memory there is also a teenage boy wearing a jean jacket with Soft Shoulder stitched onto it, blissfully unaware of how appropriate that description might eventually become.

This morning that shoulder feels tired, but there is no catastrophe to report and no great revelation waiting to make sense of it. I will probably go into the office, look at the whiteboard, choose one of the six names and start somewhere. At some point I will shower because even depression should have to observe certain minimum standards.

Tomorrow may be better, worse or exactly the same, and experience has taught me not to make promises on its behalf. That is the part I have never been able to reconcile. After all the years, all the experience, all the doctors, all the medications, all the strategies and all the attempts to understand what happens inside my own head, I can still wake on an otherwise ordinary morning and discover the emotional weather has changed overnight.

The accountant in me will begin searching for the transaction while the husband wonders whether Robyn has noticed. The professional will make sure nobody else does, and the father will think about what his children might do tomorrow. Somewhere underneath all of them is simply Jeff, feeling that familiar pressure in the pit of his stomach and knowing that this time, like so many times before, he may have to wait for it to pass.

There should be a reason for it, at least according to the way I have spent most of my life looking at problems. Something happened, therefore something changed; find the cause and you have at least taken the first step towards fixing the result. Depression has never been courteous enough to observe that logic.

Sometimes nothing happened, and those are the mornings that remain the hardest to explain. There is no cause to put into perspective, no mistake to correct and no person to blame. Yesterday was yesterday, today is today, and somewhere during the night something shifted without asking permission.

I can look at the house, Robyn, the children, the work, the garden, the golf, the books and all the evidence of a life that has been extraordinarily full. I can know that yesterday I planted vegetables and helped a young bloke with his tax return, and that today six people remain on a whiteboard because I still care what happens to them. None of that evidence is false, but neither is the darkness.

The accountant in me wants those two sets of facts to reconcile. After all these years, they still don’t.

So on mornings like this I eventually arrive at the same question. I have asked it often enough to know that an answer may not be coming, but apparently that doesn’t stop me asking.

Why today?

I still don’t know.